Schmidt To Cash Out With $335 Million Stock Sale

This afternoon, Google revealed in an SEC filing that Schmidt filed to sell 534,000 Class A (publicly traded) shares under a pre-arranged trading plan created in December 2010. At today's price, that amounts to a payday of about $335 million. It would be his first sale since 2007, and he would still hold 8.7 million shares -- 2.7% of Google's outstanding stock, worth $5.45 billion.

Some of those shares are "super-voting" Class B shares, which are allocated only to Schmidt and cofounders Sergey Brin and Larry Page.

Schmidt is not retiring. Rather, he's becoming Google's Executive Chairman, and will be spending more time talking to partners and government bodies. It may also give him more time to post on Twitter -- he posted twice today, a big increase over his usual schedule of a single tweet every few days or weeks.